He left her there and reviewed the situation. A natural caution made him wary of leaving a nothingness for the two cops to stare at. There might be a reduction of future trouble and future questions if he could give them a chance to talk each other into it being a case of mistaken identity. He walked to where red statues stood by a red refreshment stand and walked among them and selected a girl first. She was Bonny Lee’s size, and blonde, and would have been very lovely except for her deplorable lack of chin. The less inertia, he decided, the easier she would be to manage. She had on a wraparound skirt, and taking it off was like unwinding sheet tin from around a fence post. The halter top was a little more complicated. She had been caught in a frozen toothy smile. The underthings were lacy black below, uplift white above. By the time he had covered the fifty yards with her, he had, by trial and error, discovered the easiest way—to arrange her horizontally, hug her feet into his armpits and tow her. He stood her where Bonny Lee had been, rewarding Harry and Tannenbaumer with her dental smile. He remembered to leave his shoes behind when he went and selected a man. The effort was like pulling something which was being simultaneously pulled from the other direction. The moment effort stopped, the forward motion stopped. By the time he’d reached the scene with the stranger who resembled him in size only, his breath was creaking and his legs were weak with effort. He rotated the man and positioned him. He went wearily over to Bonny Lee and turned her into a horizontal position, ready for transit. He rested and reviewed the details. He recovered his wallet from Tannenbaumer’s shirt pocket, inserted one of his cards in the stranger’s wallet and put it in Tannenbaumer’s pocket. He picked up Bonny Lee’s clothing and wedged it under her arm. He shoved her purse and shoes and his shoes into the front of his shirt. He grasped her feet, hugging them under his right arm, and, leaning far forward, began to tow her toward the parking lot, two hundred yards away. He rested several times. Finally he tried to make the job easier. He pulled her feet apart, carefully bent her legs at the knees, then hooked her legs over the tops of his shoulders, plodded on, holding her wooden ankles in his hands.
Suddenly the world went bright. Bonny Lee slammed him with a tremendous impact, seat first, right against his shoulders, and banged him headlong into the sand and went tumbling end over end beyond him, with a yelp of pain and fright and a welter of flying garments. He sat up, spitting sand, and looked back. The chinless girl stood screaming, and the manacled cops were in tandem, chasing the substitute.
“Whyn’t you watch it!” Bonny Lee shrilled at him.
“Are you hurt?”
“You didn’t do me any good, you silly bassar! What the hell are you—”
He spun her into red silence. He got up, saw that he had given himself a half-hour, arranged her for transit again, and took her to the parking lot. He found a small maintenance building with a wall screening it from the road. The building itself stood between them and the beach. He straightened her legs and stood her against the wall. The look of indignation and anger was frozen on her face. He tried to brush the sand out of her hair, but the small particles remained in the air near her head. He looked in all directions to be certain they were safe, then pushed the watch stem.
“—trying to do?” she said, catching her balance. She looked around. “Oh.”
“The time ran out on me.”
“You shoulda checked, Kirby. You could get somebody hurt. You move something and then turn the world on, and it goes like hell. I seen a fella comes to Rio’s and gives me a bad time, just walking out of the ocean, so I give him a good lift up and back, like to sprain a gut, then pushed that dingus and he went on up like out of a cannon, roaring and going end over end and landing back in the water fifty feet out.”
“Are you hurt?”
She fingered her shoulder and her hip. “You like to brush-burn half the hide off me, sugar. What do we do now?”
“Let’s start by you putting your clothes on.”
“Fair enough. Shees marie, I’m pooped for sure. Where’s the cops?”
“Chasing the wrong guy.”
“You put another guy there?”
“And a girl.”
“Lot of work, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but we shouldn’t be careless with it, Bonny Lee. If too many things happen which can’t be explained, somebody is going to figure out that—”
She buttoned her blouse and slapped the rest of the sand out of her hair. “What you don’t know about people, Kirby, anything they can’t explain, they make up something suits them. If suddenly a guy can fly just like a bird, he’d know for sure it was clean living and deep breathing.” She opened her purse and fixed her mouth. “Sugar, let me have that big old watch a minute.”
“Sorry. We’re getting into the car and getting out of here.”
“Getting bossy, hey?”
They got into the little Sunbeam. The parking lot did not exit on the same street as the traffic tie-up. She stopped at the exit to the lot, the motor running. She frowned at him.
“What’s the matter, Bonny Lee?”
“I was figuring out something. Don’t mess with that watch while we’re moving, sugar. The car would stop cold dead and you’d keep on going. I’d have to clean you off the dash and the windshield with a sponge.”
“Uh—thanks. What were you doing that was making all that confusion?”
“Lots of things. Tell you later.”
“Where are we going?”
“We need a safe place, don’t we? I’m busting my biggest rule. No man was ever going to set foot in my place. Ever’body knows about it, and you can sure get in without being seen.”
“How?”
“Sugar, sometimes you’re right stupid.”
“Oh. Of course. Sorry.”
“What time is it?”
“Twenty after eleven.”
“In the morning!”
“In the morning, Bonny Lee.”
She had a garage apartment in an old part of the city, behind a stately old house of Spanish-Moorish design which, she told him, had been cut up into small apartments and was occupied almost exclusively by old ladies with small incomes. “Coming and going at all hours, and the kind of work I do, I give ’em something to cluck over,” she said. “But it keeps the men scared off from bothering me here, and I get along with them, most of them. And they bring me cakes and stuff.”
She explained how he could get in, and dropped him off a block away. He gave her ten minutes and spent the time strolling along the narrow quiet street on a shady, overgrown sidewalk. He leaned against an iron fence and, when he was not observed, he stepped into the red world. It was easier to carry shoes than to wear them. He went back to the house she had pointed out. In a lawn across the street a sprinkler made a static pattern of shining pink droplets hanging in the silent air. A small dog paused for its moment of forever, staring intently up into a tree, ears forward.
He walked along the driveway. Three old ladies sat at a metal table in the back yard in the shade of a beach umbrella, mouths ajar, knitting needles rigid. He went into the open door of the garage and turned to the right as she had told him, and up the stairs. Pulling the screen door open at the top of the stairs was like opening the weighty door of a vault. Indoors, the redness seemed more oppressive, but he could see that by normal light it would be a tiny cheerful place with bright draperies, straw furniture, gay rugs and pillows. There were framed publicity pictures of her on one wall and he peered at them with approval through the bloody murk.
She was in the small bedroom, sitting on the dressing table bench. She had pulled her blouse down from her right shoulder and was stopped in the moment of rubbing something into the abrasion from her fall. The room had a three-quarter bed, ornamental iron bars on the window, a deep window seat, a bamboo chaise, a vase of wilted flowers. He stood behind her and started to pop into her world and then hesitated. He had almost fifteen minutes left. And too much had been happening too fast. Her head was turned sharply so she could see her shoulde
r. He kissed the side of her throat. In this world it had the rigid somewhat waxy texture of polished wood. He went over and sat on the bed. The unyielding rigidity of it startled him for a moment before he remembered that in the redness everything was fibrous, toughened, yielding reluctantly to forces and pressures.
He looked at her, sitting erect, six feet away. Her back was arched, her shoulders good, the waist slender, the lime slacks plumped to the pleasant tensions of her ripeness. There was a tantalizing familiarity in the back of his mind and after a moment he identified it. He had seen a television play—two years ago?—a fantasy about a department store dummy, played by a blonde actress—Anne Francis?—and after she had been free for a little while, they had forced her back into the store, and in the final scene she had become rigid and waxen again, frozen in position, displaying a summer frock.
Bonny Lee seemed just as unreal, just as unalive, but he could move his thumb a quarter of an inch and bring her to glowing life. He had not had time to think about her, actually. But now he could take time which was no time at all, because it was time the world was not using. He felt toward her a vast and tender gratitude. She had cut briskly through a thousand dreads and fears and mysteries and had brought him joyously to his delayed maturity. It would be all too easy, he sensed, out of his new-found confidence and arrogance to devaluate the gift, to use cheap and easy words—shallow, ignorant, amoral, much as the swaggering adolescent feels obligated to jeer at the girl he so clumsily seduces.
The revelations of Bonny Lee gave him a new perspective on himself and on the world. Having thought himself uniquely inadequate, he now wondered how many other Kirby Winters there were, milling about in the world, winking at the right times, laughing at the punch lines, handling the little flirtations very well indeed, but poised to run in terror if it appeared the lady was trying to say yes.
He remembered the sound of the rain on the tin roof of the old Hudson, and the feral graspings and gabblings of Hazel Broochuk, and how weeks of plotting and importunings all came to a ghastly inconclusive end in the incredible clumsiness of those few minutes. He could have gotten as much excitement and almost as much pleasure by falling into a hay baler. And he remembered her thin pocked face in the faint light, twisted with contempt as she wriggled back into her skirt, and remembered the dreadful words which had remained forever in his mind, written in a puckering of scar tissue. “You not worth a goddamn, boy. You done me no good. Owning a hammer don’t make nobody a carpenter, boy, so you better leave me off down in the middle of town. I’ll say where.”
And there had been no one to hustle the crashed pilot into another aircraft, and the nerve was gone, and he spent thirteen years on the ground—until Bonny Lee erased the myths, peeled the scars away, showed him the bed was a picnic shared, rather than a lonely stage, where instinct was the only value and the only necessity.
Five minutes remaining.
He hefted the watch in his hand. It was the only object in the red world which did not have that odd sticky drag of inertia. And he felt an overwhelming awe at all the things it represented, at all the temptations implicit in its ownership. Here was absolute power, and total corruption. Here was a freedom so complete it became not freedom at all, but enthrallment to the witchery of being able to dislocate time itself. Here was invisibility, voyeurism, invincibility, wealth—in fact, all the night dreamings of adolescence, in one-hour subjective packages. Here was, in a specialized sense, immunity.
The possibilities of it gave him a sense of reckless, dizzy elation, yet at the same time made him distrust himself. The obligations implicit in the possession of such a device were severe. Use of it had to be related to some responsible ethical structure. And a good part of the responsibility was to conceal the power and the purpose of the device from the world.
Suppose, he thought, there were fifty of these in the world, or five hundred? Chaos, anarchy, confusion and fear. It would be as though a new mutation had occurred in mankind, a time of the superman, making privacy meaningless, making all ownership conditional.
Suddenly he was filled with an awed respect for Omar Krepps. For twenty years he’d had this edge, this advantage, and he had kept it as quiet as possible. Had he displayed the abilities this gave him, other men might have conducted research in this same direction. Apparently Uncle Omar had decided that this device would turn the world to a shambles were it released. He could see a pattern in the things Omar had done. He had quieted the publicity about his gambling winnings by returning and purposely losing an amount almost as great as the amount he had first won. He had made amateur magic his hobby—to help cover any slip he might make. He had avoided all personal publicity. And he had hidden behind great wealth, acquired quickly—yet so short was public memory, it was as though Omar Krepps and his ancestors had been rich since an earlier century.
The noise and brightness and movement of reality came into the room, and within the first two seconds he turned the silver hand back, halting reality. Bonny Lee’s hand had moved higher on her shoulder. Her head had turned slightly. He had sunk into a sudden softness of the bed and then it became rigid again, but in a more comfortable contour.
How, then, had Uncle Omar acquired the money? Wealth, he realized, is a strange abstraction concerned with the exchange of bits of paper, signing them, filing them, recording them at the right times, in the right places. Stock manipulation would not be too difficult, once the procedures were understood. He could imagine Uncle Omar trotting busily through a red hour, inserting the proper orders in the proper files, using the red time to give him the same advantage as hindsight. Once acquisitions had been made, control could be turned over to Krepps Enterprises, and money had a knack of multiplying, when there was enough of it.
But if Omar Krepps had been so aware of the potential menace of the device he had created, why hadn’t he let it die with him?
The reason, possibly, was a kind of egotism. Someone had to know. And, long ago, Uncle Omar had apparently selected Kirby as the inheritor of this fantastic power, had judged him capable of using it well, had seen to it that Kirby acquired the academic background which would enhance a judicious use of the device. The courses which his uncle had insisted he take, and which had seemed so impractical at the time, now made increasing sense. Sociology, psychology, philosophy, ancient history, comparative religions, ethics and logic, anthropology, archeology, languages, semantics, aesthetics. And then eleven years of the exercise of judgment in a context which required no competitive instinct, and made secrecy, reserve, evasion and rootlessness a habit of life.
He now sensed that it was an ideal background for the new owner of such absolute power. It created a minimum risk of the device being used for violent, random, frivolous, acquisitive purposes. It directed the new owner to use it for the maximum good of mankind.
But, in that case, why had Uncle Omar not explained the whole situation long ago? Perhaps because Uncle Omar had thought him lacking in strength and resolution, had been impatient with him, had even told Mr. Wintermore that his nephew was a ninny. And then, after the warning attack, Uncle Omar had apparently prepared for death by setting up a curiously random situation. The watch first and—a year later—the letter. He knew the letter would relate to the watch. What if he had put it in a drawer and forgotten it? What if he had been in a moving vehicle, a car, train or plane when he had fiddled with the silver hand? Why had Uncle Omar so instructed both Kirby and Wilma Farnham that immediately after his death they would be in grave difficulty? Surely Uncle Omar could have anticipated what would happen.
It all seemed to be some kind of a test, but he could not see any consistent pattern in it.
For the first time he examined the watch with great care. The ornate initials OLK on the back were worn thin. There was a catch near the stem so the back could be opened. He hesitated, put his thumbnail against the catch and snapped it open. There was a second case inside, of smooth gray metal, with absolutely no way to open it. On the interior concavity of the g
old back was engraved something else, almost as ornate as the initials, unworn. He translated, with some difficulty, the Latin words. “Time waits for one man.” It had that ring of slightly sour humor so typical of Omar Krepps. He snapped the case shut and for the first time he began to wonder about the power source. It would seem plausible to assume that distortions of space, time and energy could be achieved only through expenditures of vast power. The watch seemed to be permanently sealed. It had an old-fashioned bulkiness. Certainly the distortion of time could not be achieved through purely mechanical means. He held it to his ear and again thought he heard the faint musical note, in a minor key, like a faraway wind in high tension wires. And he wondered if its capacities could be used up, if it would work only for so long, or for so many times. That sort of information would probably be in the letter.
What if Wintermore had fiddled with the extra hand?
He felt exasperated at his uncle. It did not seem possible Omar would have left so many things to chance.
What next? The watch, properly and carefully used, with sufficient advance planning, would enable him to solve the problems of the various criminal actions and civil actions. But it would have to be done in a way which would quiet public interest rather than enhance it. A total notoriety—as Uncle Omar had realized—would make life impossible. One would be sought at the ends of the earth by nuts, monsters, shysters, maniacs, fanatics, reporters.
He knew he had started badly. Letting it get into the hands of Bonny Lee had been an inadvertent violation of the implied trust and responsibility. It should be treated with as much gravity, care and respect as a cobalt bomb. Four times he had tried to escape from Uncle Omar’s control into a life of normality, of the small goals and pleasures of the average life. He knew that chance was gone, unless he denied the responsibility by smashing the watch, or dropping it into the sea. That was one possible decision, but he could not make it until he had used the watch to remove all pressures, regain anonymity.
The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything Page 14
